How Gamifying Your Business Gets You Unstuck

By Chris Craddock

Chris Craddock is a seasoned Realtor, real estate investor, and entrepreneur with over two decades of industry expertise since 2001.

Have you ever felt stuck? I was recently having a conversation with someone I’m really close with who was stuck in his business. He’s a business owner, not in real estate but real estate adjacent, and he loves playing games. Pickleball, soccer, a whole list of things he’d light up about the second they came up. But whenever the conversation turned to business, his tone and his energy came right down.

So we asked him the obvious question. Why not just leave? Sell the business, get out, and go do something you actually love. And his answer was the interesting part. He said he loves the idea of playing games, figuring something out, the chess of pickleball, the chess of competition. He just doesn’t love business. He gets bored doing the same thing over and over again.

That’s when we challenged him with a different frame. Have you ever thought about business like chess, where you make certain moves, you get certain responses, and you gamify the whole thing? He wanted to hear more, so we gave him one example.

Start with the pattern in front of you. We asked how many people had ghosted him after he called them back. He said eight, right at that moment. When you talk about pickleball or football or anything competitive, you’re really talking about patterns. You do this, you get that response, and then you set the next thing up. The pattern here was simple: he gave them information, and they went quiet. So the move was to figure out what he could do to get a response.

My favorite text when someone has ghosted me is short: “Hey, did I do something to offend you?” People almost always respond. Some sales coaches use another version that works just as well, asking whether the person has given up on the project. Later that day, he called back and told us he’d texted all eight of those people who hadn’t responded in weeks. Five of the eight got back to him within minutes, apologizing, saying they’d just been busy. He got so excited because he’d started treating his business the way he treats his games.

That’s the big way to master the mundane. Back when I was marathon running, I’d pick a tree in the distance, a mailbox, or a stoplight, and just decide we were running to that spot. Micro-games create micro-gains, and it worked. Think about the Boy Scouts and their merit badges, or the multi-level marketing businesses that actually succeed, and their next level up. They all work because you’re giving yourself a reward for something.

We joined a fitness program with the goal of 10% body fat and a six-pack, and it was full of business owners who set themselves a prize for hitting it. A sauna for the house. Whatever it was. I bought a Ninja ice cream maker so we could make protein ice cream once we hit the goal. Every one of those is the same mechanic, and it’s the mechanic who does the work. There’s real research behind it. When Harvard Business Review covered a study on gamified training at KPMG, the finding was that game elements like progression, instant feedback, and points meaningfully improved performance on work people would otherwise slog through.

So if you’re stuck right now, the questions worth sitting with are these. Who in your life is going to help you gamify your business? How are you going to get out of that place where you’re stuck and move forward?

If we can help you build a business environment that’s actually fun to run, respond to this message, and we’ll dig into it with you. We’d love to figure out how to build a game where business gets fun again. You can also book a call with us directly or email us at ChrisCraddock@ChrisCraddockLeadership.com, and you can find more at chriscraddockleadership.com. Go get it.